Opening

Imagine Parliament, commanding a two-thirds majority, passes a constitutional amendment that abolishes judicial review, or converts India into a state without elections, or strips citizens of the right to approach courts altogether. Could such an amendment survive? For the first two decades after 1950, the honest answer under Indian constitutional law was: quite possibly, yes — because the Constitution's own amending clause did not say otherwise. That changed through a sequence of Supreme Court judgments that lay citizens, law students and UPSC aspirants keep returning to every year, and that is exactly what the current crop of 'landmark judgments' retrospectives — on Golaknath, Berubari, the Basic Structure Doctrine, and the EWS case — are really about. This piece explains the doctrine those cases built, since none of the recent headlines actually unpacks it end to end.

What happened

Several recent explainers and year-in-review pieces revisit a common thread: the Supreme Court's decades-long effort to define limits on Parliament's power to amend the Constitution under Article 368. Educational pieces trace the arc from the Berubari Union case (on whether a constitutional amendment was needed to cede Indian territory) through the Golaknath case of 1967 (which held Parliament could not amend Part III fundamental rights at all), to the doctrine of "basic structure" that later replaced Golaknath's absolute bar, and finally to how the Court applied that doctrine in testing the amendment that introduced economic (EWS) reservation. Read together, these pieces are less about a single new judgment than about the continuing life of one constitutional principle — which makes it worth explaining properly, provision by provision.

The law behind it

The starting point is Article 368, which gives Parliament power to amend the Constitution by special majority, and in some cases with ratification by half the States. On its face, this power looks unlimited — it does not list any part of the Constitution as unamendable.

The second relevant provision is Article 13. Clause (2) says the State shall not make any "law" that takes away or abridges the fundamental rights in Part III, and any such law is void to that extent. The entire early controversy turned on one question: is a constitutional amendment a "law" for the purposes of Article 13(2)? If yes, then even a validly passed amendment abridging fundamental rights would be void. If no, Parliament's amending power under Article 368 is untouched by Article 13.

Fundamental rights themselves matter here because they are the rights typically at stake — equality before law and non-discrimination under Article 14 and Article 15, equality of opportunity in public employment under Article 16, the protected freedoms under Article 19, and the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21. The machinery for enforcing these rights is equally central: Article 32 gives citizens a direct right to move the Supreme Court for enforcement of fundamental rights, and Article 226 gives High Courts wide writ jurisdiction. Any amendment that curtailed these enforcement provisions would, in effect, make the rights themselves unenforceable.

Two other provisions entered the story because Parliament tried to use them as shields. Article 31B, along with the Ninth Schedule, was designed to place specified laws beyond the reach of fundamental-rights challenges altogether. Article 31C went further, protecting laws made to give effect to certain Directive Principles (under Article 39, for instance) from being challenged as violating Articles 14 or 19. Both provisions represent Parliament's attempts, at different points, to insulate specific categories of legislation from fundamental-rights scrutiny — and both became key battlegrounds for the basic structure doctrine.

How we got here

In the 1950s, the Supreme Court initially took the view that a constitutional amendment is not "law" within the meaning of Article 13(2) — so Parliament could amend fundamental rights freely under Article 368. This position was tested repeatedly as Parliament amended the Constitution to protect land reform and other laws from challenge, often by expanding the Ninth Schedule under Article 31B.

The turning point came with the Golaknath case in 1967, where the Supreme Court reversed course and held that a constitutional amendment does fall within the meaning of "law" under Article 13(2), meaning Parliament could not amend away fundamental rights at all. This was an absolute, and controversial, restriction — it meant even amendments Parliament considered necessary for social and economic reform (such as those touching property rights) could be struck down outright if they abridged Part III.

Parliament's response was the 24th Constitutional Amendment, which inserted express language into Article 13 and Article 368 clarifying that Parliament does have power to amend any provision of the Constitution, including fundamental rights, and that such an amendment is not "law" for Article 13 purposes.

This set up the decisive confrontation, resolved in 1973 in the Kesavananda Bharati case, heard by a thirteen-judge bench — the largest in the Court's history. The majority arrived at a middle path between Golaknath's absolutism and Parliament's claim of unlimited power: Parliament can amend any part of the Constitution, including fundamental rights, but it cannot use that power to damage or destroy the Constitution's "basic structure" or fundamental framework. The judgment did not produce an exhaustive list of what counts as "basic structure," but subsequent cases have treated features such as the supremacy of the Constitution, the rule of law, judicial review, the separation of powers, federalism, secularism, and the identity of India as a sovereign democratic republic, as falling within it. Because Article 32 and Article 226 secure judicial review and access to courts, attempts to curtail them have been treated as a direct threat to the basic structure.

The doctrine was tested again soon after, when the 42nd Amendment attempted to insert clauses into Article 368 declaring that no constitutional amendment could be questioned in any court on any ground — an explicit attempt to place the amending power itself beyond judicial review. That ouster was struck down as itself violating the basic structure, on the reasoning that limited amending power is itself part of the Constitution's basic structure; an amendment that gives Parliament unlimited amending power destroys that very limitation. The same case examined the expanded reach given to Article 31C and confirmed that a proper balance between fundamental rights and directive principles is part of the basic structure, so directive principles cannot be used to wholly override Article 14 and Article 19.

Most recently, when the 103rd Constitutional Amendment introduced economic-criteria (EWS) reservation, petitioners argued that reservation based purely on economic criteria, and the exclusion of existing SC/ST/OBC beneficiaries from this new quota, damaged the equality code under Articles 14, 15 and 16, and thus the basic structure. The Court applied the basic structure test squarely to this amendment — testing whether it altered the identity of the equality code rather than merely operating within it — and upheld the amendment by majority, while the exercise itself reaffirmed that every constitutional amendment, however popular or well-intentioned, remains subject to this basic-structure scrutiny.

What it means in practice

For an ordinary citizen, the basic structure doctrine is the reason a government with even an overwhelming parliamentary majority cannot, through a constitutional amendment, abolish judicial review, remove free and fair elections, or convert India into a non-secular or non-federal state. It functions as an implicit, judicially enforced entrenchment clause that the text of Article 368 does not itself spell out. For litigants, it means that a constitutional amendment is not automatically final merely because it followed the correct procedure under Article 368 — it can still be challenged if it is alleged to alter the Constitution's identity. For law students and UPSC/judiciary aspirants, this line of cases — Golaknath, Kesavananda Bharati, Minerva Mills, and the EWS judgment — remains a near-certain examination staple precisely because it explains the actual relationship between Articles 13, 14, 19, 21, 32, 226 and 368, rather than treating them as isolated provisions.

What to watch

The doctrine remains a living, evolving standard rather than a closed list. Future constitutional amendments — on reservation, federalism, tribunal structures, or election law — will likely continue to be tested against it, and courts have so far declined to fix its boundaries exhaustively, leaving room for genuine debate in each new case about what exactly counts as part of the Constitution's basic structure. Readers should treat any claim that a particular feature is "settled" as part of the basic structure with some caution, since the doctrine's content is worked out case by case rather than laid down in advance.